


An Extended Metaphor

by MetaAllu



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, May contain triggers, Mental Instability, Mentions of Drowning, Other pairings if you squint, PTSD, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-21
Updated: 2012-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-29 21:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MetaAllu/pseuds/MetaAllu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing is quite what anyone expected it to be, but they'll work with what they have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Extended Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Mentions of drowning, torture, mental instability, PTSD, and alcoholism. May contain triggers.

He'd built the Iron Man armour to protect him.  He'd built the it in a dark cave with a glorified battery in his chest: Something to keep him alive long enough to burn, and something to slowly poison him while keeping his heart in one piece.  Someday one or the other, or both, will kill him.

Death is a funny and confusing thing, second only to love, which — unsurprisingly, because he's Tony Stark — is a factor in his life, and a few — very few — of the decisions he'd made.  Love, he assumes, is the cause for his existence.  His parents had been in love, and from their love and the subsequent acts he doesn't care to use in context of 'his parents', came him.

He was raised, as many rich children before him, in a world of nannies.  He was nothing special, save for his mind.  'A genius' they called him.  He went to MIT at the age of 15, much to his father's distaste.   _Expensive_ , he'd complained, never mind that his son was going to college three years early.  His mother had found time between charity functions and fundraisers to tell him that she was proud of him and take him to dinner.  She didn't say 'I'm sure you're father's proud, too' because Tony was a genius, and he was 15, and he was too old for lies.

He finishes MIT, comes away with an engineering degree.  He's still not good enough; his mother dies (His father falls in love with bottles of whiskey and the nights when he finds a good fuck: men, women, and everything in between.  Howard Stark isn't picky).

"Steve Rogers," his father tells him one night, a bottle of scotch in hand.  He's slumped in an arm chair, feet kicked up on the coffee table.  His head's tilted towards the ceiling, and Tony's not even sure he's being spoken to until his father says, "You shoulda met him, Anthony.  He woulda been good, woulda been great." He downs the rest of the scotch.  "Woulda protected you from me." He throws the empty bottle at Tony's head.

He dies as well, victim of his bottle and his misery; and Tony is left with a too-big house, a butler, and a company with his name on it.  Tony learns to smile without meaning it; he learns to lie through his teeth, and he marries a bottle of whiskey.

*

"Steve Rogers," He says and holds out his hand.  It's warm and strong; He grips and shakes with the firmness and polite brevity of a soldier.  He's everything Tony ever thought he would be, and everything Tony never thought anyone could be.  Jealousy settles cold and heavy in his gut like cheap wine, and burns up his insides like lit gasoline.

"A pleasure to meet you, Captain Rogers," Tony says.  In Tony's chest little pieces of shrapnel tremble, fighting against the thing he's put in his chest.  He wears three shirts to block out the light.  One way or the other, Tony Stark is going to die: It's going to be messy and miserable (Timely and just the way it should be.  He's Tony Stark; Starks always go down in flames).

"A pleasure to meet you as well," He says; and then he smiles, all honesty and youth, perfectly preserved by ice and chemicals, like dead rats for high school biology class dissections: wide-eyed and petrified, limbs stiff, ready to be cut open with a dull scalpel and catalogued.

*

Tony finds that drifting in a substance abuse-induced haze makes life less insufferable.  He sees ghosts from the corners of his eyes, and then sometimes a ghost sits in his kitchen and drinks his coffee.  He learns quickly, and though He doesn't encourage Tony's behaviour, Tony sometimes catches a glimmer of mirth in his eyes, or a slow-cracking smile on his face.  Sometimes He looks around the mansion, and Tony thinks He sees ghosts too; sometimes he looks at Tony, and everything goes still and quiet.

"I should sell this place," Tony says one day.

"Yeah," He agrees.

*

Tony sits surrounded by memories he doesn't want, carefully wrapped and packed away in boxes, labeled with neon stickers and thick black sharpies by the star-spangled man.  Despite not owning a single object in the Stark mansion, he'd seemed more than willing to help pack it all away.

"That's the last of it, I think," He says and Tony looks at the boxes on the floor.  He's half-tempted to tell Him not to bother, to tell him he's going to toss most of this out.  He's definitely not keeping anything labeled 'Howard's office'.

"Thanks," Tony says instead, and He smiles.  Tony can't help but smile back.  Sometimes he wants to ask Him how he can smile, how he can look so happy when his entire world has been wrenched out from under him and buried under six feet of dirt and wrecking balls, over and over again until there was nothing left but headstones and memories.

They take some of the boxes to Goodwill and on the way back to the mansion, He stops in the middle of the street, then turns to Tony and says, "I think I got beat up in that alley once."

*

Tony turns the top two floors of the Stark Industries skyscraper into a penthouse.  Somehow the other Avengers end up moving in, which actually isn't too big of a deal since there's lots of room, but suddenly Tony lives in a place filled with life and noise and arguing.  Pots get broken and blenders get smashed with hammers by confused Norse gods.  Arrows get shot into the walls and half-finished sketches get framed and hung.  The tower is devoid of ghosts, except sometimes when one sits at his kitchen table, and drinks his coffee, and looks at him with sad eyes.

*

The hospital smells disgusting: Rubber and medicine and death.  Tony really needs a drink.  He'd  _had_  a drink, but then something had set off Bruce's truncated fuse and there had gone that.  On the other hand, hospitals and alcohol tend not to mix.  There is likely a reason he isn't on pain killers yet, and he fondly refers to that reason as 'vodka'.

The pros and cons to having a giant, green, temperamental monster on your superhero team are more or less equal.  These scales are slightly tipped when said giant, green temperamental monster has wreaked havoc and carnage throughout your living room; and then, upon having run out of furniture to rend, turns to your sloshed person and makes unwitting attempts on your life.

He remembers very little, but what he does remember is not particularly comforting, or all that grounding.  Mostly there's roaring, and pain in his gut, and resounding cracks as skull meets wall.  Tony remembers Him swearing, and the rest is a blur.

His brain is still stuck on that one cuss word.  Tony's never heard Him curse before, the supposed human perfection.  He'd never thought about His humanity: He'd been an idol, a blushing virgin; a perfect and patriotic American, draped from head to toe in stars and stripes.  He'd never been a soldier in Tony's mind.  Sometimes it's easy to forget that He fought in the war or that he ever was human.  Tony had seen the files, the photos.  He'd also seen the propaganda, and heard his father speak.

The Super Soldier Serum: A formula developed to enhance humans to their peak physical level.  It does not touch the mind.  Captain America is kind and patriotic and everything Tony can never be all on his own.  The idea cracks along his skin and seeps into his pores, slowly pulling apart the seams of him that so carefully keep him together.

He remembers sharp pain along his skull and spine.  He had had trouble breathing; a familiar sensation.  He felt water in his lungs, felt his heart stutter and suddenly he'd been worried about phantom wires and about breathing and getting away.

He remembers laughing until his whole body shook.

Tony feels like time is slipping through his fingers — time he could be using to fix the world — so when He walks in, Tony is quick to ask "What the diagnosis, doc?" all self-satisfied smirks and creeping doubts.

"Cracked ribs."

Tony considers this.  "Oh, I guess that explains why I feel like I'm drowning."

"What?"

"Nothing."

Steve looks at him, stares him down like every therapist Pepper's ever hired, and then his mouth sets in a firm, unhappy line.  "Tony, if you ever need someone to talk to..."

Tony's deflects with a fake smile and an attempt to stand that ends with him face-first in that perfect chest.  "Nothing to talk about," he answers, trying to sound flippant.

Steve grips Tony's shoulders and pushes him back slightly, looking him in the eye.  "Tony," he repeats firmly, tone disapproving.

"Steve," Tony counters, and smiles just the way his father would.  Steve lets go.

*

Wednesday night is movie night.  They gather in the living room, pile on the sofa, and then argue for an hour over what they want to watch.  Clint likes those stupid comedies filled with crude jokes; Tony likes movies where lots of things blow up; and Natasha just thinks they're all idiots.

 _A team-building exercise_ , Steve had said.  Tony thinks it's just because they never see each other otherwise, unless the world is ending.  They don't make a very good team.  They're at odds with each other, they're bad roommates and they disagree on everything; but when they all gather on the couch and watch a movie, the house goes quiet.  Tony usually falls asleep.

Sometimes they watch old Captain America reels, just for the hell of it.

"For the record, I didn't say that," Steve says one night, face twisted up in some sort of half-smile.

"What did you say?" Clint asks, suddenly coming alive from his end of the couch.

Steve bites his lip and steals a glance at Natasha.  "I can't say with ladies present," he murmurs at last, looking sheepish and a bit foolish, and his cheeks and ears go pink.

Tony chokes on laughter and soda.

*

The quietest place in the Avengers tower is without a doubt the library.  Tony isn't surprised to find Steve there with a book open in his lap.  What does surprise him is that Steve's eyes are shut.  His head is tilted to the side, body lax with sleep.  He breathes slowly and shifts when the sun stripes across his closed eyelids.

Tony walks to the window and slowly pulls the curtains shut, blocking out the light.  The room is suddenly dim and uninviting, and Tony almost wants to open the curtains back up.  He can hear ghosts in the corners.  Steve, with his legs kicked up and his skin unexposed to sunlight, looks dead.  He's breathing slowly and shallowly, chest barely moving and he's unbearably expressionless.  Tony feels a chill down his spine like ice.

He takes hold of Steve's shoulder and shakes.  Steve jolts awake, coming alive like a wind-up toy.

"Hey," he rubs his eyes, still blearily blinking sleep and ghosts from his eyes.  Tony fears for a horrible moment that Steve will mistake him for one of them.  "Is something wrong?"

Tony stares at him, at the ghosts melting and falling off his skin like snowflakes.  They slip through his fingers and down his shoulders, seeping through the floor as if they were never there at all.  They leave cracks.  Ghosts and ice and snow (water in his lungs—  _breathe_ ).

"No," he says.  Ice and snow and water and wires.  "You shouldn't sleep here.  It's not good for your neck."

Tony doesn't think about it, watching the shadows on Steve's cheeks.  The corners of Steve lips are lifting up in a slight, exasperated smile,  and Tony feels a strange sense of kinship, leaning down.  Steve's lips are warm and chapped and unmoving.  The taste of Steve's mouth lingers between them until Steve leans up and closes his eyes as their noses bump.  Tony tilts his head and their lips meet.  Beard and five-o-clock shadow rasp over each other.  It grates but the kiss goes uninterrupted, slow and unhurried.  Tony pulls away because his neck hurts from the angle, and Steve runs his thumb slowly over Tony's kiss-reddened bottom lip.

The library is dead around them and ghosts lurk in the shadows.  Tony stands up straight and walks away.

Starks always go down in flames.

*

It's not something that they talk about, not something that really needs talking about.  Sometimes Tony swears he's still dying in a cave, and Steve can't seem to shake the 1940s from his skin.  There's ice cold water in their lungs, and they're drowning.  Sometimes they drown together and sometimes they drown alone, and sometimes there isn't enough room for drowning, so they save the world and scream at each other instead.

*

"Doombots," Tony says.  The word sounds tired on his tongue, overused and overworked.  "I am so sick of doombots."

"Iron Man, can we focus here?" comes Steve's voice, sharp and commanding.  It throbs through his skull right into the squishy places, and Tony resists the urge to turn his repulsors on the walking talking American flag of a man and blow him to smithereens.

"Sir, yes, sir," he says instead, voice dripping with snark that doesn't go anywhere near unheard if Rogers' sigh is anything to go on.

Doombots is something that Tony could do with his eyes shut — something that he has done with his eyes shut — and it's over before he can even start complaining.  Hawkeye manages, but he's always been impatient.  That really means something coming from Tony.  He's not really sure how anyone puts up with him.  Then again, he's not sure how anyone puts up with any of them, including himself.  They're all pretty insufferable in the end.  Maybe that's why they all put up with each other.  Clint makes cookies.  That helps.

*

The winter is unusually brutal, dumping a grand six inches of snow on their perfectly coiffed heads, and like true New Yorkers, they hole themselves up in the Avengers tower and order pizza.  They drink more hot chocolate and coffee than is probably healthy and stick fake logs in fake fireplaces.  Tony can actually see his hands shaking from his caffeine high.

After a couple of days of this, in which there is no superhero-ing needed — apparently the villains of New York are also true New Yorkers; except for this one thing with Loki, which Thor takes care of, and which somehow ends with Loki spending the night and then disappearing — Steve finally gets up off the sofa where he'd been sketching and goes into the kitchen.  Tony follows in hopes of more coffee, and makes another pot himself when Steve starts rooting through the pantry instead.

"What are you doing?" Tony says when Steve turns on the stove.

"Cooking."

Tony manages not to gape.  Much.

"You cook?" he says.  At least he got out two words, especially considering how much coffee he's got in his blood at the moment.  He pours himself another cup and takes a sip, sighing as the bitter tang bursts onto his tastebuds.

"Yeah, well, with my mom sick, and Bucky about as responsible as a sack of potatoes..." Steve stares down at the pot he has on the stove, then picks up a knife and starts cutting vegetables.

Tony leans on the counter and watches as Steve tries to put his ghosts into the soup.

"Have you looked them up?" Tony asks.  "Your friends from the war?"

"Dead or dying," answers Steve flatly, putting a lid over his soup to let it cook.

"Oh." Tony feels awkward.  It was none of his business, but it's rare that his mouth and brain are attached and working together.  He drinks more coffee so that he doesn't have to talk.  Steve stares at him, and right through him, and Tony hides behind his mug so that neither of them have to face themselves.

"Your father," Steve says, still staring at him.  "What happened to him?"

"A dead wife and an expensive bottle of scotch."

Steve's eyes widen slowly and he swallows, then looks away.

"He got married," he mumbles finally, then frowns.  "I... well, of course he got married.  I mean," he waves his hand vaguely in Tony's direction.  "Just, knowing him when I did, I hardly expected..."

"He was pretty long in the tooth," Tony says in a soft tone, and he has no idea why the hell he's comforting Steve.  He's hardly the one who was never good enough.  It seemed as if Steve could do no wrong in Howard's eyes.

Steve nods and stirs the soup.  He sets the spoon along the rim of the pot and then takes Tony's half-empty cup from him, their fingers brushing as he does so.

"You've had more than enough coffee, Tony."

"No such thing," Tony quips, but he lets Steve take the cup anyway, and then he lets Steve cup his chin and lick the taste of coffee from his lips.

Steve's mouth is just as warm as the last time they kissed and Tony definitely needs to brush his teeth or pop a breath mint or chug some mouth wash if they're going to do this, but Steve's got his arms around Tony's waist, and he can't bring himself to move away, so he fists his hands in Steve's shirt and kisses back.

They all have soup for dinner, and even after Tony brushes his teeth that night he can still taste Steve on his lips.

*

"Doombots," Tony says.  Most of his systems are fried — if not from the new Iron Man immobilizing weaponry Doctor Doom's mechanical lackeys possess, then from the fall out of an airplane shaped like a giant doombot (he swears, Doom just gets tackier and tackier every time they fight.  He should hire a design consultant.  A paper trail would certainly make it easier to keep an eye on him.  Not that he doesn't already have one.  Giant robot-shaped airplanes don't come cheap), and spur-of-the-moment spelunking into a rather dark and unfriendly lake — and what ones are functioning are quickly dying or completely useless.  If he could kick his former self in the nuts, he would.  This is what he gets, he thinks, as cold water floods around his ankles through the leaks in his armour, for being over-confident.

"To—Iron Man, you still with us?" comes Cap's voice through the chatter of  the others strategizing to make up for the fact that Tony is slowly drowning at the bottom of a large, cold body of water.

"Uh," Tony says.  He's doing his very best not to panic.  So far, so good.  "More or less." His voice shakes a little.  Wires wires wires.  He wishes he could move his arms.  "I am so sick of doombots."

Steve laughs, sharp and surprised, and Hawkeye takes a moment to pipe up with "Ain't we all, buddy?" and Hulk provides an enthused, "Hulk smash!" that sets Tony momentarily at ease, and lets him mull over the absurdity and repetition of their lives.  It's the same thing, day in day out, with little variations like immobilizing guns that he will absolutely compensate for the instant he gets home.  Provided he does get home, preferably still breathing in and out with as little plankton on his lungs as possible.

"Can we not fight in giant airplanes anymore? Especially over lakes.  My toes are going numb," Tony says, trying to sound casual as the water slowly rises over his kneecaps.  He is unreasonably dreading the moment that water gets to his dick because it is seriously absolutely freezing.  Why are they fighting over a lake in February?  "This is so not kosher."

"Do you even know what kosher means?" Natasha asks.  Her words are followed by several dull thunks that Tony has come to associate with bodies hitting the floor, something not all that uncommon where Natasha is involved.  The woman is an absolute machine.  Tony would love to take  _that_  apart.

"Hang tight, Iron Man.  We're — cffggkkkkk — ou," says Steve.

"So nobody panic," Tony says while doing his best not to panic.  "But my comm's dying."

He gets only empty static as a reply and then he closes his eyes because all he can see outside his helmet is brown lake water anyway.  He counts backwards from one hundred, and the water rises up to his hips.  There's still nothing but static.

He's starting to feel light-headed, and his chest is starting to get tight.  He tries not to calculate how much time he has left until his suit fills with water — rate of the water, pressure, room left in his suit in square inches; two point two five, a seven dangles in the back of his brain — tries not to think about how it will feel to have that water pressing in around his torso, filling his mouth, burning it's way down to his lungs—  _breathe_.

He keeps his eyes closed.  He thinks about movie nights, about what the hell kosher is, about a warm mouth on his, and shrugs the ghosts off his shoulders.


End file.
